November 10th 2010

GIVING VOICE INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL
Giving Voice 12: Hearken! Do you Hear An Angel?

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10th - 14th November 2010, Teatro Era, Pontedera, Italy

Join us for an uplifting compendium of voice workshops, performances, talks, and lecture-demonstrations reflecting voices, methods and modes from around the world.

Giving Voice springs from a strong belief in the voice’s ability to communicate beyond language and cultural difference, and that working with the voice can allow people, from wherever they come, to enjoy and value the riches of difference as well as the recognition and celebration of a common humanity. At its heart is the idea of koinonia, in the ancient Greek sense of choros and congregation, encountering ourselves and each other through the voice.

Giving Voice attracts some of the world’s finest performers and voice teachers. Workshop teachers and performers at Giving Voice 12: Hearken! Do you Hear An Angel? include: Victoria Hanna (Israel), Marianka Sadovska (Ukraine), Giovanna Marini (Italy), Francesca della Monica (Italy), Vadhat Ensemble (Iran) and Teatr ZAR (Poland).

Giving Voice 12: Hearken! Do You Hear An Angel?

That missing fundamental that we ‘think’ we hear? Is it an angel passing by?

This edition of the Giving Voice Festival - GV12: Hearken! Do You Hear An Angel? - takes as thematic constellation two vital organs for the voice - the heart and the ear - aiming to explore auditory pathways to and from the heart, through sound, song and musicality.

Now for some heartwork (Rainer Maria Rilke)

In invoking angels, we are purposely not locating the ‘heart’ in the chest, the hippocampus, or the solar plexus, nor the ear primarily in the head or the brain; instead sourcing the physiological and analogic valencies of both organs in perception and reception as ‘whole body’ process: where the body - the heart - acts as echo chamber and vessel of inner and outer aural universes, the world as sound, receiving and creating the other, omniprescienctly in [re]cognition of hope.

If you want to know me, look inside your heart. (Lao Tzu)

We wish to reassert in ethical terms the primacy of the ear and the act of listening with the idea of the ‘re-sounding listener’, where the assimilative sense of hearing is ‘tuned’ and attuned through active listening to represent, reflect, and symbolise psychological, spiritual and social action.

“When angels visit us, we do not hear the rustle of wings, nor feel the feathery touch of the breast of a dove; but we know their presence by the love they create in our hearts.” (unknown)

In calling angels, we are playfully evoking the missing fundamental, the ‘virtual pitch’, the immaterial, the phantom in and of the imagination. We are also purposively evoking perceptions of angels as primarily feminine, and so provocatively invoking the high – and feminine – voice, as the dominant voice, the ‘melodic’ and monodic, and the source of a fundamental ‘harmonic’.

Embracing melodic organization, cadence and emotional affect as essential modal components, Giving Voice 12: Hearken! Do You Hear An Angel? explores the voice monophonically in terms of ‘coloratura’, ‘toccata’ and ‘cadenza’, where harmonics, ornamentation, timbre and register presage the polyphony, communality, counterpoint and pluralism of the many ‘voices ‘of self and society.

Giving Voice is an established biennial international event mounted in Wales by the Centre for Performance Research (CPR). It aims to advance the appreciation and understanding of the expressive voice and celebrate its many and varied manifestations across time and culture. Sharing ideas and practice through workshop, performance, and discussion, the festival brings together those - performers, teachers, scholars, healers - who have an interest in the voice but who may not necessarily meet in the usual course of their practice. This twelfth edition of Giving Voice is hosted by, and conceived in collaboration with,Teatro Era, Pontedera, Italy

“For me, ‘Giving Voice’ sounds always a note of renewal of hope and expansion and springing ideas. I burn my candle both ends and in the middle and am re-ignited…That extraordinary dissolving of barriers and triggering of joy that distinguishes Giving Voice from any other workshop gathering that I know. The personal input that you all make, the personal investment, pays off one hundred percent in the humanity of the experience...You have a genius by now for finding the right people and bringing them together in the same place so that spontaneous combustion of ideas and creativity explode.”
Kristin Linklater, Author of Freeing the Natural Voice

“Giving Voice was enlightening, educational, inspirational, and very powerful. The work, the conversations, the camaraderie – all of it was of a calibre rarely to be found anywhere else. I feel honoured to have been a small part of this extraordinary event.”

“Each time I attend I am impressed with the quality of the presentations, workshops, and performances. This festival is by far one of the best offered internationally. The work that you do is cutting edge and draws some of the best practitioners and scholars from all over the world. I do not find at other conferences and festivals the same level of discourse and experimentation, the wide range of work and body of knowledge. Thank you!”

Past participants of Giving Voice


To register your interest in the project please contact us by email and a full programme of events will be sent to you as soon as it is available.

weblink(s):www.pontederateatro.it/PT/Default.aspx,

June 28th 2010

CPR COLLECTIONS NEWS - SUMMER 2010

1. CPR Collection changes…

2. Society for Theatre Research

3. The Third Forage: Dance and Choreography

4. World Theatre Journal Donation

5. Box lists online!

6. Making Theatre Making History

7. Performance Research Archive

8. Digitisation KESS Scholarship

9. International Theatre Collection Books Available

10. Volunteers- a thank you!

To Download the CPR Collections newsletter please click on the link below.

email:mws@aber.ac.uk

More information (click on the filenames to download):
Collections_News.doc

June 4th 2010

THE LABORATORY THEATRE NETWORK


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The Centre for Performance Research is pleased to announce the formation of a Laboratory Theatre Network.

The Laboratory Theatre Network will ask how theatre laboratories have experimented with form and content, with generating innovation in technique/craft, application, aspiration, and in the social and communal function of theatre. It will investigate how laboratory theatres have carved out their own liminal experimental spaces in relation to both mainstream professional theatre and the disciplines of theatre/performance studies and how, as such, they are in precarious and often isolated positions in the current geopolitical and economic climate. This Network aims to assess recent histories of laboratory theatre and to examine current independent configurations before collaboratively proposing new modes of experimental practice.

CPR will be joined in this research project by three other network partners:

The Grotowski Institute, Wroclaw,Poland

The Grotowski Institute is a city institution which combines artistic and research projects that correspond to the challenges laid down by Jerzy Grotowski’s creative practice. It was formed around Jerzy Grotowski, the key late twentieth century laboratory theatre figure and both continues and expands his work and ideas and hosts the Grotowski Archive.

Odin Teatret, Holstebro, Denmark

Nordisk Teatr Laboratorium/Odin Teatret has a broad remit of research, pedagogy, performance and ‘transformance’ (integrating performance into the community). Its research is further developed through ISTA - International School of Theatre Anthropology - and the University of Eurasian Theatre which itself is a network of about sixty artists and university researchers from different geographical areas, traditions and genres. Materials from all these activities are organised in collections and archives. It has the status of a self-governing institution and works closely with the University of Aarhus.

The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, New York, USA

The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics is a collaborative, multilingual, and interdisciplinary consortium of institutions, artists, scholars, and activists throughout the Americas. Working at the intersection of scholarship, artistic expression, and politics, the organization explores embodied practice—performance—as a vehicle for the creation of new meaning and the transmission of cultural values, memory, and identity. It is hosted by New York University (NYU), NYC, USA.

The Laboratory Theatre Network is the recipient of a Leverhulme Network grant.

March 11th 2009

THE DIRECTORS’ FORUM BLOG GOES LIVE!
Images from left to right: Cake Theatre, Cases of Murder - Ruth Kanner Theatre Group, New Jericho A'dam - Station House Opera.

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The Directors' Forum: The Six Senses of the Director, 9 – 18 April 2010, Aberystwyth

CPR invited some of the most exciting and diverse Wales-based and international theatre directors to Aberystwyth for an intensive participatory project that offered a rare opportunity for both experienced and emerging directors to gather and share the methods, approaches and skills of professional directing practice via laboratories and presentations, demonstrations and dialogue.

Guest Directors included: Veenapani Chawla (Adishakti Centre, India), Das Beckwerk (Denmark), Richard Gregory (Quarantine, UK), Bill Hamblett (Small World Theatre, Wales), Natalie Hennedige (Cake Theatre, Singapore), Adrian Jackson (Cardboard Citizens, UK), Ruth Kanner (Ruth Kanner Theatre Group, Israel), Julian Maynard Smith (Station House Opera, UK), John McGrath (National Theatre of Wales), Anders Paulin (Sweden), Ralf Richardt Strobech (Hotel Pro Forma, Denmark), Tore Vagn Lid (Transiteatret-Bergen, Norway)

Throughout the forum our team of bursary barters and other participating directors updated the Directors' Forum blog with exploratory findings and news from inside the laboratories.

http://thedirectorsforum.blogspot.com/


Images from left to right: Cake Theatre, Cases of Murder - Ruth Kanner Theatre Group, New Jericho A'dam - Station House Opera.

The Foundry, Aberystwyth, Wales

email:cprwww@aber.ac.uk
weblink(s):www.thecpr.org.uk/projects/conferences.php,
More information (click on the filenames to download):
Ruth_Kanner_s_Laboratory.jpg
ARTEL_and_an_impromptu_performance_photo_Rob_Drummer.jpg
Directors_family_Tree_Photo_Rob_Drummer.jpg

March 11th 2009

PERFORMANCE RESEARCH JOURNAL – REQUEST FOR ORIGINAL ISSUES

Do you own any early issues of the Performance Research Journal? CPR holds very few of the first three series of the journal and the first issue of the fourth:

1996
1.1 Temper of the Times

1.2 On Risk

1.3 On Illusion

1997

2.1 Letters from Europe

2.2 On Tourism

2.3 On Refuge

1998

3.1 On America

3.2 On Place

3.3 On Ritual

1999

4.1 On Cooking

If you have any original copies of these journals that you no longer need (or indeed any later ones) please consider donating them to CPR to create archive sets. Or, if you were planning to sell them, please call Helen Gethin at CPR before you offer them to a second hand book-seller : heg@aber.ac.uk, 01970 622133

email:heg@aber.ac.uk

March 11th 2009

STAYING ALIVE : CPR UPDATE

You may have been wondering what has happened to CPR since we reported last year that our appeal against ACW revenue disinvestment was not upheld. As reported at the time, the proposed change from revenue to possible project funding was likely to cause the redundancies of key staff and suspension of CPR’s public and professional programme in Wales.

Well, as you will be aware, there has been a suspension of all the public-facing activity (presentation, production, co-production and professional training programmes) across the last nine months and we have sadly lost some members of staff and are still undergoing a process of restructuring and reorganisation. We write now in re-emergence.

CPR’s remaining major partner, Aberystwyth University, has continued to support the organisation’s academic and research projects and has given what other short-term support it can to keep previously ACW-funded staff in place during this unusual transitional period, for which CPR is grateful. CPR has continued to keep channels of communication open via the CPR Bookshop, website, Resource Centre, MA teaching and publishing programme whilst fundraising to enable the reinstatement of a public and professional programme. The period since the decision has been taken up with a great deal of strategic activity: head-scratching, dreaming, scheming, planning, research, writing, meetings, and – what CPR does best – action! – the fruit of which can be seen below in the collaboration with the Grotowski Institute on a special edition of the Giving Voice Festival in April and an innovative and challenging programme of professional development aimed at emerging and established theatre directors – the Directors’ Forum - (the result of a successful grant application to Arts Council Wales) to be held In September.

So, whilst CPR is pleased to announce an exciting range of activities forthcoming in 2009, we cannot yet report a long-term solution for the survival of CPR, for all the staff and its public and professional projects. For Wales, CPR intends to work to re-establish small streams of funding from ACW on their proposed project to project basis, as well as to pursue other opportunities initiated and propagated by ACW to enable the continuation of projects in Wales of the kind that have made an important contribution to its performance ecology for so long. At the same time, now that we have the freedom to work more often in other parts of the world we are now availing ourselves of the opportunity to respond to long-proffered collaborations with other partners and institutions.

We once again sincerely thank all those of you who have supported us, written to us and to ACW and on our petition, to try and reverse their decision to remove our funding. Your words meant a great deal to us and continue to do so. We may be cash poor but we remain rich in spirit, with many good friends, and the determination to survive, work hard and thrive.